"What the bloody hell is wrong with me today?" I muttered aloud, pushing open the heavy wooden doors of the pub.

"Firstly, you're talking to yourself, Flicka."

"Piss off, Lori." I groaned, really not in the mood to deal with my celebutante relative, whose heels I could hear clacking like a pair of cheap castanets behind me.

"What? I'm trying to help. You were acting really weird back there; even your friends said so." I knew they thought something was up with me when I declined to socialise with them and the locals.

"I'm just tired... and slightly drunk." I watched Lori's eyes appraise me, her expertly-groomed brows rose sceptically. I remembered her doing that face when we were younger; Most memorably the time she was at my house and whilst she was looking for one of Barbie's shoes in the toy box, I scoffed the two custard cream biscuits my mum have given us as an after dinner treat. She threw me that look and I knew she didn't believe me an invisible unicorn had eaten it.

"It's true! Why are you being matey with me all of a sudden anyway?" I hoped by changing the subject she would stop giving me the infamous look. She kept on staring at me. My right eye twitched as she continued to gawk, and I felt like Luke Skywalker trying to resist the dark side.

"This-crazy-lady-with-claws-trapped-me-in-a-maze." I blurted out rapidly, wincing as I realised what I'd just said. She narrowed her eyes at me.

"What?"

"Nothing, nothing, I was just kid-" She pointed a finger in my face; it was so close to my nose I could see the individual little crystals glued onto the tip.

"You're not lying; I know when you're lying." Damn her and her mystical truth-deducing powers! The force was too strong for weak Jedi mind.

"If I tell you, and you laugh; I will actually punch you." Lori looked down at her expensive nails and winced, she wouldn't win a bitch fight with me without breaking her Hollywood extensions.

"Deal."

As we trudged up the road back to Gran's cottage, I relayed to her everything that had happened since the garden centre up until my cuckoo pub nightmare.

"Back there in the beer garden, I had this dream-"

"A scary dream?" She interrupted.

"No, I-"

"A dirty dream?" She winked conspiratorially. I flushed and stuck up my middle finger at her.

"Ha-ha, so it was! About the silver-haired guy?" I made a noise that sounded like Black Beauty having a feather duster stuck up its equine nostrils.

"Oh please, that boy is weird- not that the dream guy wasn't, he said I was his 'destiny'." Lori made a face

"Was he hot?"

"It was a dream."She flashed me the look for the second time that night; it was seriously worse than a carafe of truth serum.

"Yeah, he was pretty lush, but he totally had this sleazy vibe; like the moustached blokes in silent movies that tie damsels to railway tracks." My cousin laughed, though it wasn't her false showbiz laugh, it was her real throaty guffaw she had inherited from her dad.

"Flicka, you have one hell of a vivid imagination." She didn't believe me; I couldn't blame her though, I certainly wouldn't if she had been the one telling me about her run in with a clawed granny.

"You think I just imagined it?" Lori wiped a tear form her eye and nodded, still chuckling away.

"We both know how horrible it is being dumped at Grammy Ivy's, the thought of six weeks' with her probably just sent you temporarily schizoid." I smiled reluctantly and shrugged. Though I knew more than anything the day's odd events were not a hallucination, it was probably best to try and banish my concerns and make the best of being stuck in Cornwall for the summer. "Now we've established you were only momentarily mad, you can cheer up and look forward to tomorrow."

"What's tomorrow?" Lori smiled dreamily.

"Civilisation! Nathan is driving us all into Bude!" Bude. Bude seemed like such a nice, safe option, no forests there! Just souvenir shops, tourists and homemade ice cream.

What could possibly go wrong?